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Poor man's nmap for a class C network from rfc1918
What do you do when nmap is not available and you want to see the hosts responding to an icmp echo request ? This one-liner will print all hosts responding with their ipv4 address.

easily convert one unit to another
Easily convert units of similar measurement. May also be invoked alone, units.

Find usb device in realtime
Using this command you can track a moment when usb device was attached.

Set laptop display brightness
Run as root. Path may vary depending on laptop model and video card (this was tested on an Acer laptop with ATI HD3200 video). $ cat /proc/acpi/video/VGA/LCD/brightness to discover the possible values for your display.

Display rows and columns of random numbers with awk
Displays six rows and five columns of random numbers between 0 and 1. If you need only one column, you can dispense with the "for" loop.

Lists architecture of installed RPMs
Lists all installed RPM packages with name and architecture, which is useful to check for compability packages (+ required i386 packages) on a 64bit system.

Randomly run command
Randomly decide whether to run a command, or fail. It's useful for testing purposes. . Usage: ran PERCENTAGE COMMAND [ARGS] Note: In this version the percentage is required. . This is like @sesom42 and @snipertyler's commands but in a USABLE form. . e.g. In your complicated shell script, put "ran 99" before a crucial component. Now, it will fail 1% of the time allowing you to test the failure code-path. $ ran 99 my_complex_program arg1 arg2

Stop Flash from tracking everything you do.
Brute force way to block all LSO cookies on a Linux system with the non-free Flash browser plugin. Works just fine for my needs. Enjoy.

Check if your desired password is already available in haveibeenpwnd database. This command uses the API provided by HIBP

Fastest Sort. Sort Faster, Max Speed
sort is way slow by default. This tells sort to use a buffer equal to half of the available free memory. It also will use multiple process for the sort equal to the number of cpus on your machine (if greater than 1). For me, it is magnitudes faster. If you put this in your bash_profile or startup file, it will be set correctly when bash is started. $ sort -S1 --parallel=2 /dev/null && alias sortfast='sort -S$(($(sed '\''/MemF/!d;s/[^0-9]*//g'\'' /proc/meminfo)/2048)) $([ `nproc` -gt 1 ]&&echo -n --parallel=`nproc`)' Alternative $ echo|sort -S10M --parallel=2 &>/dev/null && alias sortfast="command sort -S$(($(sed '/MemT/!d;s/[^0-9]*//g' /proc/meminfo)/1024-200)) --parallel=$(($(command grep -c ^proc /proc/cpuinfo)*2))"


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